Unplug Your Kids - White

This week, we focused on black and WHITE photography for the theme white. We took some pictures:



And, we studied two black and white photographers: Minor WHITE and Helen Levitt.


Minor White

Minor White

Minor White

Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt

Here's what we learned:

Minor Martin White was an American photographer born in 1908 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned a degree in Botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933 and began his working career as a poet. In 1938, White moved to Portland, Oregon where he began his career in photography. He was a member of the Oregon Camera Club and he also worked for the Works Progress Administration. He taught classes at the YMCA and exhibited work at the Portland Art Museum.

After serving during World War II, White moved to New York City in 1945. He spent two years studying aesthetics and art history at Columbia University. During that time, he got to know several influential photographers including Alfred Stieglitz,Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. He photographed things usually considered mundane, making them special by the way they were photographed. One of his more popular photographs is titled Frost on Window, a close-up of frost crystals on glass. White moved to the West Coast to join the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1946. He worked there until 1953 when the school enrollment began to decline. This part of his life was covered in the 2006 book: The Moment of Seeing: Minor White at the California School of Fine Arts. White's first major exhibition was in 1948 at the San Francisco Museum of Art. He co-founded the magazine Aperture in 1952. He edited the magazine until 1975. He worked as a curator at George Eastman House and edited their magazine Image. He taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology from 1956 to 1964. He also taught at MIT for 10 years before he died in 1976. He is most known for his ideas about the spiritual self and photography.

Helen Levitt was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York. She is known as a "street photographer" around New York City, and has been called "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time." After dropping out of high school, she taught herself photography. Her first well-known photographs are those of children in 1937 drawing with chalk. She worked with photographer Walker Evans in 1938 and 1939 and she had her first solo exhibition "Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children" at the Museum of Modern Art. In the late 1940s, Levitt made documentary films with Janice Loeb and James Agee. She received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of The Quiet One. Levitt remained active in filmmaking for nearly 25 years. In 1959 and 1960, Levitt received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take color photographs on the streets of New York, and she returned to still photography. In 1976, she was a Photography Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Although she has not taken photos since the early 1980s, she is still living in New York.